Tag Archives: FFXIV Power leveling

A fan asked the forbidden question, presumably typing fast enough to finish the post before lightning struck him down for his heresy. And then he got a blue reply.

Why the obsession with DiabloWikiTreasure Goblins? Why are people so fixated on expanding the game around these little beasts? It really surprises me.

Grimiku: I think people suggest creating new events themed around Treasure Goblins because they incorporate several fun game elements.

You risk getting into a bad situation during the chase

You have a chance at being rewarded

It feels great when you prevent one from escaping

It’s exciting to discover one

Sometimes they require tactical engagement

They’re mischievous and mysterious

This is just to promote discussion, but why do you like or dislike Diablo 3 Treasure Goblins ? Would you like to see them in more events?

I’ve wondered this myself. I’ve been tracking all of my legendary finds for a few months, and in that time I’ve found about 230 legendaries, 2 of which came from Treasure Goblins. And yet… I still want them. They’re so Gobbily!

That said, I can’t resist going after the little shits. I brought FFXIV Power leveling that up on the last podcast, asking the guests if they chased Gobbies when they were making a new character. And they both said yes. No one can help it.

Gobbies have terrible odds to drop a Leg, but at least in Inferno it might happen and be valuable, plus you get gems and Tomes of Secret. On Normal/NM/Hell though… why bother? They’re worth minimal experience and if you’re leveling fast on a reroll you probably won’t even bother to pick up those Chipped Topazes and Pages of Blacksmithing.

Demon Wall (Amdapor Keep)
Before someone fires off that I’m just bitter, let me be clear: I’m not saying that this fight is too hard. If I pull Wallace and he doesn’t go down on the first round, either I’m with a bad group or the group is just having a bad day. This fight is not nearly as bad as advertised.
That being said, Wally here is an example of stacking too much into a single boss fight. The DPS race with simple mechanics is great, but obviously the design team realized that this was just a little too simple and threw in gnats to make tracking the pattern more difficult. But it comes off as arbitrary; rather than a clever way to distract players it just feels like “now there are adds here, whoa.” It nicely flummoxes new players into making mistakes, but it’s a cheap shot.

Final Fantasy XIV is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, or MMORPG. Like many in the genre, it requires a subscription to play the game, which is done via the Square Enix Account Management System. Players first create and customise a character, being able to select from various pre-selected options including race, gender, facial features, and job type. After selecting a character name and server to play on, they are placed into the game world, where they are free to partake in the game’s story, explore the landscape, fight various monsters, complete quests and missions, and interact with other players. Unlike many Final Fantasy games, the player may choose to play in third- or first-person view.
Until recently, the sylphs celebrated a traditional springtime festival known as the Dance of the Tusks, in which tribe elders would enter a ring armed only with a spear and a cape, and test their mettle against ferocious wild boars. When a tragic accident led to one of the elders being gored and eaten, however, the tribe was left with little choice but to abandon their heritage. Fearing the wrath of the elementals, the sylphs canceled all future Dances and set the remaining boars free, including the fattened male champion, Phaia, who still roams the Black Shroud, his bloodlust as intense as the day he gained his freedom.

Feared around the realm for reducing all it touches to ash, the Bomb Baron pursues its prey with a passion hotter than the whitest forge. Legend says this abomination was once an adventurer who made his name culling thousands upon thousands of bombs across Eorzea, until one day a stray bomb caught him unawares and he died of burns rendered by the voidsent’s timely explosion. Upon hearing of the soul’s arrival in the fiery depths of the sixth hell, the Bomb King snatched it up and used ash from his own body to resurrect the adventurer as a bomb. He dubbed the creation the “Bomb Baron” and sent him back to Eorzea, telling him that his soul would suffer eternal torment until he had taken the lives of as many adventurers as he had bombs.

Though these creatures can appear hauntingly similar to existing monsters, their ferocious nature sets them apart from their weaker cousins. Many an adventurer has met an untimely demise by failing to recognize risks that come with engaging these deadly adversaries. To ensure you fare better, this post not only includes in-depth views of three select notorious monsters, but provides screenshots for all twenty being introduced. It will also take a first-time look at three pieces of epic gear obtainable by slaying the beasts.

Upon hearing of the soul’s arrival in the fiery depths of the sixth hell, the Bomb King snatched it up and used ash from his own body to resurrect the adventurer as a bomb. He dubbed the creation the “Bomb Baron” and sent him back to Eorzea, telling him that his soul would suffer eternal torment until he had taken the lives of as many adventurers as he had bombs.

Unlike the traditional crafting system that is mostly automated, the crafting system in Final Fantasy requires a players complete attention and even a certain level of skill. This does mean the typical AFK approach to crafting progression doesn’t work very well but it brings a variety of benefits with it.
When players craft they have the option of just pumping out regular materials or they can use the special abilities assigned to the crafting job to create higher-quality versions of that material. The higher-quality materials are worth more Gil (in-game currency) on the Market Place but they can also be used to increase the chances of creating a high-quality item or piece of equipment.

This process means some players will spend hours gathering high-quality ore to create high-quality bars which in turn can be used to create high-quality armor. This approach works across many aspects of the crafting in Final Fantasy XIV and it’s one of the games most positive aspects.

Square Enix didn’t get everything right with Final Fantasy XIV the first time round but the rebirth has provided features and mechanics unique to the world of Eorzea. What are your thoughts on the FFXIV crafting system? Would you make any changes?

I want housing. I want stuff to do in a group, and I want stuff to do solo. I want to build a house and then I want to go run a dungeon. I want a sandpark, a term I started using back in 2010 to describe the first version of Final Fantasy XIV.
There’s no universal answer to this. For some people the answer is EVE Online, for others it’s World of Warcraft, and for a vocal and presently quite unhappy portion of the population the answer is City of Heroes or Star Wars Galaxies. If there were one template for what MMOs should be, we wouldn’t have a plethora of different games; we would have one that occasionally received a major update. What I can say with authority is what I want from an MMO, what makes a game something special.

That really goes for every set of mechanics. If you include crafting, don’t have it just be a matter of “click a button and wait.” Ryzom had such a good idea with its various material components, but the crafting still came down to click-and-wait. I don’t want to just click on random nodes to gather; I want to be able to gather. I want depth. I might never want to play a miner, but if I decide to, mining should have an actual game involved rather than just the tedium of walking to nodes and clicking.

The action bar and battle command input method differs slightly between the PC and PlayStation 3 version. The PC version supports both point and click and number pad selection of commands or macros from the action bar. Macro commands are customizable sequences of actions that allow players to execute complex maneuvers with precise timing. The Cross Hot Bar on the PlayStation 3 version instead maps the action bar and macros to shortcuts located in four horizontally arranged icon sets in the lower part of the screen. These are the grouped and accessed through a combination of the L2 and the R2 buttons and the directional pad or the face buttons. Using each shoulder button to cycle through the cross sets, players have quick access to commands. This interface is also available to PC gamers who play with gamepads.
No big deal, right? Just wait and they’ll replenish. True, but the reality was that in order to get rarer items it meant doing something inane like waking up at 3 a.m. when fewer people were playing to catch the source before it was harvested. For someone like myself who gets to only play at certain times of the day with my job and family, this isn’t really feasible. Considering that playing video games is part of my freakin’ job, you realize how ridiculous this is.

It also breeds an unfounded sense of entitlement where resources are owned by an “elite” group of players who have that sort of luxury in their time. It doesn’t really matter if I play the game ten hours a week for a whole year, there are simply going to be times when hard work will never be equal to a teenager who can pass geometry on four hours of sleep.

And tanking feels fantastic in FFXIV. The balance of skills, consistent variety in boss fights, and clarity about what’s happening on-screen all work in harmony. When tanking is at its best, I feel like a maestro, coordinating everyone to the right place at the right time, ensuring that they’re safe and controlling the ebb and flow of the battle.
It’s the kind of feeling that’s just not possible in a single-player combat—or in an MMORPG that’s trying emulate single-player combat. The amazing feeling of successfully guiding a party through a situation that’s just on the border of being out of control is one that only an MMORPG can provide, thanks to its rigid class structures and combat style. FFXIV Power leveling This is the great strength of the genre, and when games attempt to deprioritize group play by setting dungeons to the side and making them optional or by blurring the lines between class roles, they become weaker games. They fail because this kind of combat is built for that jigsaw-puzzle feeling, and it doesn’t stand on its own.

All that makes me far more willing to forgive FFXIV’s relatively few sins. The crafting and gathering systems are incredibly boring, for instance, but they’re well-integrated into the rest of the game, and it’s possible to work around them by making connections and money. I simultaneously disliked crafting and respected the system for fulfilling the rigid constraints and work/reward loop demanded by the genre.

I don’t want to give the impression that FFXIV is deliberately inaccessible. It doesn’t reach the level of impenetrability of, say, Eve Online. The presentation, especially the music, is charming, which provides a huge motivator to keep going. The game’s pop-up tutorials tend to actually be helpful and come up at the right times. Perhaps most impressive is the way the game’s early quests start simple and escalate in complexity to avoid being overwhelming while also training you for later parts of the game.

Look, there’s a whole lot to be speculated upon here, and I’m not going to re-write the work that others have put together. The bottom line is that however this plays out, there are things we do not know about the Ascians. Quite frankly, my first guess is that there is more going on between Hydaelyn and the Ascians than we know about and that this dynamic is not quite as clear as it seems on the surface. We might be looking at a Promathia situation here, in other words.
Having said all that, I really hope that it’s a while before we get back to the Ascians in this degree. We’ve foiled one of their plots and dealt them a blow, FFXIV Power leveling but they’re not very compelling villains at the moment. And it would be great if we saw other storylines explored in more depth before we got to have another go at this root problem.

And the game doesn’t lack for new antagonists. We know that the Dravinians are barely being held back by the Ishgardians who desperately need outside help, and we know only the bare minimum of what the Dravinians are actually like. It’s the perfect time for Ishgard to open her gates and let adventurers aid the great city against its foes with the Empire no longer bearing down upon the three nations. At the same time, it’s also a perfect chance for Eorzea to start taking land back from the Empire, starting with Ala Mhigo and continuing north.

The first dungeon in which you can start picking up endgame currency, Stone Vigil is more like Brayflox than its predecessors. It’s not a treasure extravaganza, but the bosses are the right mix of challenge and fun, the layout is clean without being simple, and the pulls along the way aren’t something you can face on autopilot. A solid dungeon all around.
The second boss really puts the truth to how important good DPS play really is; the boss is trivially easy to tank to the point where I just stood in the doorway tanking without even moving on my first run through. Running later as DPS it became a lot trickier and more involved. FFXIV Power leveling The last boss, meanwhile, will really force everyone to play at peak — there are lots of mechanics so that everyone stays active, but nothing that’s cheap or overly ornate. Fun place, really.

This is probably one of my favorite dungeons, although the random drops kill me in here. This is the second dungeon to contain a unified set of armor for each role (Battlemage, Infantry, and Cavalry) and also one of the most treasure-laden dungeons available, with good odds of getting five greens and four aetherial items on a single run. If it dropped tomestones, no one would ever leave. I still probably won’t leave for quite some time, as despite my best efforts I haven’t seen an Infantry Shirt drop once in my several dozen runs.

My interest in Final Fantasy XIV is not purely about racing to the endgame, but I am well aware there is an endgame. And while I’m easily distracted by the pursuits of other goals such as leveling Arcanist, I’d rather be on the early side to the party. There’s nothing wrong with not being the first at endgame, but I’d prefer to beat the rush, if you know what I mean. So my playtime has been focused a bit more toward getting to the end of the story quick-like.
This also means going through a lot of FFXIV Power leveling dungeons. I’m not quite up to the last rush, but considering a lot of people I see are still moving into stuff I left behind a while ago, I’m still a bit ahead of the parabola. So let’s take a look at the dungeons along the path from level 1 to level 50 after the initial set (which I covered back in beta).

The first three dungeons require a visit, but this is the first dungeon in the game that’s optional. There’s a quick quest explaining what it is and why you should go there (there’s stuff in there), but if you want to reach the level cap without ever stepping inside (and without ever filling out your Grand Company hunting log), you can feel free. That having been said, there’s some good stuff in here, and it’s another step up of the mechanics that were present in the first three dungeons.

All three bosses require dealing with adds, and that means that all three are really requesting that DPS players step up their game. Tanks can easily hold the bosses with few issues, but DPS can’t be on cruise control either. It’s a theme that is lightly addressed early on and reaches a climax much later, so look forward to that.